Greetings Matt,
Have started making a drafting table; basically 4 legs connected by stretchers low down on the ends and aprons around the top.
Legs are 2 and a quarter X 4 inches in cross section; stretchers and aprons are 1 and a quarter X 5 inches in cross section.
Joints will be stub tenons glued for the front to back direction and wedged tusk tenons for the left to right direction so that the table is KD.
Question…….what dimension should I assign to the tenon shoulders all around??
Question……what does a tusk tenon look like???
Thanks,
Hank.
Replies
Hi Hank,
This sounds like a great project for practicing mortise-and-tenon joinery.
I'm going to turn to Tage Frid for advice on this one. He wrote the quintessential article about mortise-and-tenon joints in Fine Woodworking Issue #3. He says a tenon should be roughly 1/2 the thickness of the stock if you are joining an apron to a thicker leg. (If joining two pieces equal in thickness the tenon should be closer to 1/3 the thickness of the stock.) That means your shoulders should be about 1/4 in. wide on the sides. The top and bottom shoulders should be 3/8 in. or more.
The wedged tusk-tenon joint is a challenging joint to make. There's a lot to cut and line up. Essentially it is two wedged tenons cut on a single board that fit into two parallel mortises. More commonly, I've seen it made with the tenons side by side (like in this article). I can't seem to find any examples where the tenons are vertical like in your drafting table design, but the cutting technique will be similar to what's described in the above article. Here's another article on wedged-tenon joinery that might help.
Write back if you need more specifics.
Matt Berger
Fine Woodworking
Thanks Matt; Tage too.
H.
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